New Perspectives on Supervised Visitation and Safe Exchange

A visitation program is one of the few community agencies to interact with each member of a family. It is likely to be the only agency that has ongoing weekly or other regular contact with everyone and as such it has much potential to protect children and adult victims of battering and to help parents who batter begin to repair the harm they have caused. The first call or appointment and the kind of welcome that each person receives influence everything that happens from that point forward. This paper provides an overview of a shift in the practice from agency-centered intake to person-centered orientation as a framework for welcoming mothers, fathers, and children to the experience of supervised visitation.